


Beauty On the Brink Of Death

by lucius_complex



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Loneliness, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-09-12
Packaged: 2018-02-16 23:24:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2288423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucius_complex/pseuds/lucius_complex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is little difference, Loki thinks, between the scent of flowers and the scent of death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I’m sorry - my stories are not abandoned, my absence unintended. I have been living in that other world. I do not necessarily enjoy it, but there I must stay for awhile… I miss this place, to be amidst things secretive and make-believe, friends who would not ken me if they saw me in the street.
> 
>  
> 
> This is a very short story, I hope you enjoy it.

 

**BEAUTY ON THE BRINK OF DEATH**

 

 

 

_Under yr_

_I mean_

_In yr_

_What I mean to say is_

_On yr_

_No_

_I was thinking of walking a trail by a creek in Texas_

_When I saw_

_First_

_Snowdrops_

_Then Iris_

 

 

 

 1

 

Whilst in prison, Loki thinks - there is no realm quite like Midgard so unique in its ability to simultaneously captivate and repel. 

Beautiful mountains. Sickly animals. Cities colliding and collapsing into each other, devouring a hungry path through the soil like false rivers, a thousand buzzing languages joining and mutating like cells, creatures with lifespans like flies, cold that wasn’t cold, fresh air that wasn’t fresh, above all the scents and smells of Midgard.

Life itself was like smoke rising from a hundred different pans in a chef’s kitchen, different aromas depending on what ingredients was thrown into the mix, how it was heated. Some of these flavors, Loki had discovered, could come to be particularly addictive and complex.

One in particular, had come to be - ironically, _hungrily_ \- nigh unforgettable.

*

A god has a lot of time to think, more so when in prison, and so Loki thinks nothing of whittling them on fanciful nothings. Thor drops by intermittently, stumbling drunkenly between hope and resentment like a bear with an invisible thorn in his paw that he thinks only Loki can remove. Odin keeps his distance, but takes pains to provide the trappings of comfort, even going so far as to provide access to spell books deemed harmless and visitor rights – as if Loki has friends to take advantage of them.

In times of normality, Loki would have seized the opportunity to replenish his learning.

Instead, he daydreams, feels the cavities of his chest expand and collapse, the hollow ache between his ribs that is its own weight.

It feels familiar, like heartbreak.

*

Flowers, is what Loki decides. He liked the flowers on Midgard best. There were so many. They thrived so earnestly, and oh so quietly. Few knew that Loki collected plants in his brief stay on earth; that he frequently took on perfunctory human disguises simply to walk past gardens and nurseries.  

Midgard's flower shops are akin to beautiful graveyards – so many go there to die, and Loki loved their stale, sickly sweet deaths - the perfumed cues of their wakes, the scents that lingered like stone markers long past their deaths.  

The Avengers smelled of death too – dripped with it, the deaths of others -long umbilical cords of invisible red ledgers floating around each of them dripping blood, a whole ghost library written by five people. On days Loki was particularly sensitive, he could hear the low confused murmurs of their dead when they stood together, amplifying each other.  

Loki sees but does not reveal; that they are drawn together because of this very reason – because this is the only space for orphaned gazes to meet, ashamed and secretive and sympathetic.

He had not expected _Thor_  of all people to join this band. Thor was- well his brother was no abandoned thing. Thor is - was, supposed to be _bigger_.

Brighter, by far.  

Loki had not know how lonely Thor was, how exiled, until the day he saw the god of Thunder join gazes with those humans, and glow in the recognition of others.

He supposed only then did Loki begun to truly love his brother.

 *

One person continuously intruded on his impartial diagnosis, however.  One presence that strained within the boundaries of his (usually) effortless distance.

Loki thinks of Tony Stark and the sickly sweet scent of death upon him - of rust and wine and bitter wind, and the thought fills him with an inexplicable longing for Midgard’s flowers; endless hours whiled away stroking their soft velvet folds. There is innate beauty in the way earth flowers died, heavy and languid and drugged. 

Tony Stark always only smelled of his own impending death, even as he constantly defied it, and Loki knew not why.

*


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

2

 

_Then wild cherry blossoms which smelled like_

_Tortillas_

_Then narcissus and I bent down_

_Several times_

_To pick them_

_Thinking of the bare hotel room_

_I was staying in_

_And of how a spray of forsythia,_

_A branch from cherry or plum_

_A blue violet_

_Would give me some sense of my life_

_Different_

_From the institutional walls_

 

There are certain paths Loki likes to take, certain walkways dark and winding and secretive, so well loved that he could find them even in dreams. They lead him into untold corners of time, abandoned space corridors, and in them Loki would meander past the oldest stars, touch the birthing scars of the universe. They had always revealed themselves to Loki, who could find them unerringly even as a child wandering through the vast gold halls of Odin Allfather.

He’d felt so tiny then, had thought the world so full of wonders.

By the time he grew up, one world had completely yielded its secrets, and his family watched with disquiet as Loki’s eyes dimmed whenever he surveyed the golden halls of his childhood, finding them a poor patina for the hollow concrete within. His eyes grew sharp and disillusioned, and his lips clamped down on words of kindness, starving them out. 

In that _other_ world however, Loki was always a small and lonesome creature, and this was truth he resounded with and preferred.

And so Loki had grown up knowing two homes, at least in his version of growing up –the happier one in which he could no more share as others could discern or appreciate. In time he grew comfortable with seeing himself as a solitary figure skirting the jagged edges of worlds, traveler and observer of dark spaces where only those who were truly wild and truly free roamed.  

In his incarceration on Asgard, Loki fell heavily back on old habits.

Eventually of course, his aimless walks lead him back to earth, following the half-formed fancies that disappeared into the ether whenever he turned his gaze inward, attempting to divine their intent. He does not know why he returned, only feels a fleeting sense of something having been lost -  though he could not say what it was.

It felt to him like something left on midgard, a misplaced thing, although the god does not remember making an attachment – neither to place, person, or object.

But Loki has time to fritter away, time to give in to sentiment, so he is _here,_ aimless and wondering as he was in youth _._ He might as well look around. Unlike Asgard or Vanaheim, heis not made to feel an interloper here. Midgard is a polluted world, a world that worships ambition and opportunism and indifference. She asks little of Loki, cares even less of his motives. Her whoreish, indifferent qualities suit his current indolence.

Since it is to be a trip based on sentiment, he goes back to Keukenhof first. His magic limits movements to places Loki had been to on Midgard – dreamwalking will never be an exact science, its precision points were sunk into modules of memory, accessible only from there. To enter a space, he needed to start and end at a spot he’d preciously stood before.  And thus a line of wooded path swells with a carpet of closely planted grape hyacinths, thus tulips bending in the brisk Dutch air, along the morning flower markets of the Bloemenmark , thus New York and strolling past Gapstow Bridge in Central Park, and finally the Avengers Tower, apparently no longer a heroes tower but still the home of its creater, where he found Tony Stark smelling of sour-sweet wines and dying of palladium poisoning.

Stark can see him. Loki doesn’t question this abnormality, for all he knew, ‘this’ was all happening in his head – sometimes his mind does deceive him, and it’s been a long while since he’d checked.

Likely because he is so inebriated, the engineer, instead of drawing a gun or alerting his comrades merely taps two fingers to his skull and announces; ‘Yup, its finally happening.’

‘What do you think is happening?’ Loki askes in a voice hoarse with disuse. He seldom ventured commentary, when dream walking.

‘It always starts with visions, these things,’ Stark nods in satisfaction. ‘Insane in the membrane. Excellent choice of… avatar, brain. Can’t fault your taste. Sorry, _my_ taste.’

Stark thinks him a figment of his imagination. Stark leers at him, pats the floor beside him and raises a challenging eyebrow.

Loki sits, for lack of a better thing to do. He squints as Stark hands him a bottle, a large flask of Midgard’s favorite choice of slow-acting poisons. ‘These will not harm me half as much as they will you.’

‘No, but they sure make everything better.  Come on poncy, don’t make me drink alone.’

‘Why do you not seek the company of friends? Are you truly content to die alone?'

‘You’ll do. ’ Stark closes his fever-bright eyes, pretends at a restfulness he clearly doesn’t feel. ‘Isn’t this nice.’

Loki clears his throat again – speaking has become so cumbersome a thing. ‘How much time do you have?’

Stark cracks an eye open but instead of answering he hums. Loki watches him, then turns his attention into Stark’s body and focuses his gaze into microscopic zones, watching the duel of withering and vitality battling within those mortal cells. Stark would not have long to go, most of his body is eaten up by toxins, corruption of the lymph nodes. Cancer too. Approaching kidney failure. As he withdraws he can feel almost as if against his own hand the sensation of muscles pulling as Stark smiles.

He places Stark’s skin back, lush earthling eyes that could suck in stars – and the gods that stood upon them.   

‘Why am I here?’

‘Maybe I summoned you,’ Stark says insolently, before surrendering to a cough that hacked bloody dribbles down his chin. ‘Dying’s not so bad. You get to make all this,’ the mortal’s gesture was expansive, including himself in the equation, ‘somebody else’s problem.’

Loki shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’

‘Hmm. So why’d you do it?’

Loki drew back, leaned againts the pillar and stretched his legs out on the floor in imitation of Stark. ‘Why do we do anything?’

‘To make a noise in the universe before we die? But you don’t die, am I right? You lot just go on, forever.’

It was Loki’s turn to close his eyes. ‘All the more need to ‘make a noise’, as you so kindly put it.’

‘We’re flattered,’ Stark says sardonically. ‘Thanks for waving at the primates, next time trying doing it in a less destructive away.’

‘Midgard’s very code is destruction. It is programmed into your planet, your very natures.’

‘Ah ah ah, but we create in equal measure to all that entropy. You immortal types who do not die, you wouldn’t understand it. Completely different ecosystem.’

‘I shall take careful notes of our conversation, Man of Iron.’

Stark snorted from the tip of his bottle, and for a good long while, nobody spoke. Loki drifted, floated through city skylines, picking out the little green squares below.

‘What are you really doing back here, Reindeer Games?’

The scent of death reached out to him, musk and moss and palladium poisoned blood, pulls him back to the tower and to Stark.  Loki folds his arms behind his head and tilts his head to the sky and breaths deeply in.

‘I missed the flowers.’

 

*

 


End file.
